Although the Panasonic LUMIX LX3 clearly aims at the serious photographer, the ease of use remains the same. The well-known green button is missing; however, P (Program) offers the same ease with the possibility of setting your own preferences. Likely more important is the speed with which the camera is operated, with besides that a logical structure of the buttons that will make the regular photographer feel at ease immediately.

Panasonic Lumix LX3 camera menu
Despite the compact size and the somewhat small buttons, the operation is fast and straightforward. The handy joystick on the back of the camera is easy to operate with large or small fingertips. The menu is well-structured and will be familiar to a Panasonic camera owner. The use of large white letters on a black background with a limitation in the use of colors, makes it clarifying and transparent on the whole.

Scène mode on the Lumix DMC-LX3
The lens contains a switch that lets you select the image ratio. When the ratio is changed, the 3 inch display is also immediately adjusted. Creative photography is thus quite an obvious choice with this camera. And of course, the enhanced photographer will want to switch to A (Aperture priority) and play with the depth of field. Yet I will not be surprised if this enhanced photographer too decides to set the command dial to SCN (Scene mode) to select a preset scene from the more than 20 available ones. To be honest, working in this mode is extremely comfortable.

Panasonic LX3 offers a built-in flash
The built-in flash has to be folded up manually; this should not be considered a nuisance. The combination of the bright zoom lens and Panasonic's optical image stabilizer is sufficiently powerful to shoot often in environmental light. It does suit a camera like the DMC-LX3. It's a camera purely meant for shooting, with emphasis on working with the camera supported by the comfort a compact camera has to offer. Yet there are differences in approach. Where the average compact has as few buttons as possible, the Panasonic LX3 offers the opposite.

Photograph in RAW and JPEG format
The Panasonic LX3 features an abundance of buttons, although not one of them seems superfluous to us. If you want to have the possibility to manually interfere, you will be in need of the necessary material. In addition to the impressive equipment, it is a real joy that the Panasonic LUMIX LX3 also supports RAW format and even offers the possibility of storing a combination of RAW + JPEG. An extremely beautiful camera.